My dad recently asked me to replace a missing button on his shirt. “Do you happen to have an extra button?” he asked. An extra button? I have a 28-year-old collection of plastic, pearly, metal, wooden, coconut-shell and fish-shaped buttons sorted into spice jars. Since the day I was married, I told my dad, I had never thrown out a single button. Every half-dead shirt or kurta in our house has been stripped for parts before it is cut up into rags.
Many families, I’m grieved to hear, have no button jars in their homes. Do they buy a matching button each time they need one? Do they get by with safety pins? Does their butler take care of that kind of thing? Or do they just stuff the bereft garment deep inside a drawer and move on?
What makes some people save every little thing just in case, while others look for the nearest dustbin? Some of it has to be hereditary. My grandmother owned only one steel trunk containing her other sari, her reading glasses, her prayer books, and pieces of string, in case anyone asked. And someone inevitably did. She could invisibly darn silk, I’ve heard, or reweave an unravelling reed mat. Whenever I braided rags into a rug or edged a worn blanket, someone declared I took after my grandmother, because mending had become outdated even in my childhood.
My American friend Miriam had an equally thrifty and inspiring grandmother, a master of embroidery and other fine crafts. Miriam does all that and more, having recently assembled a bed and bookcase for her new home out of discarded office furniture. But heredity can’t explain it all. Both Miriam and I have acres of cousins, and yet we more often discover fellow salvagers out of the family than within it. My neighbour makes planters from off-cuts of bamboo and moss sticks supported on spent tube lights. My friend’s mother makes all her Navaratri kolu dolls from household scrap, including a Ravana with ten moustachioed matchbox heads and a packaging-foam Saraswati, playing a veena that used to be a receiver from a toy phone.
For Miriam, being part of a large family meant a rich vein of hand-me-downs, and the hippie ethos of the 1970s made it chic to turn old jeans into shoulder bags or even dresses. My inspiration came from American books about pioneers in the Great Plains or immigrants in city slums. These characters routinely saved every scrap from their dressmaking and patched them together into quilts. They cut worn sheets in half and joined them up with the better parts to the middle. They “turned” their faded gowns, taking out the stitches and reassembling them inside out.
We can’t shake the habit. Miriam says, “I do tend to save every little piece of yarn, ribbon, and fabric along with buttons, etc. You just never know!” And I have a stash of old sari borders and fallen feathers.
These days we can scour websites to figure out what to do with a cracked washbasin or all the bits and bobs we’ve socked away. They’ll show you how to turn your shirt into a laundry hamper, your scooter tyre into a light fixture, your buttons into necklaces, and your necklaces into buttons. It’s called “upcycling” now, and the new objects are meant to look so elegant that everyone is inspired to join in. But I don’t know if that dry word reflects what Miriam and I do.
Some of the things we make out of found objects may look pretty to others, but to us their looks don’t matter. We have fun just getting there.
